Obituary
by Obsidian Blade
Summary: A Scourge necromancer's attempt to find life after life amongst his own victims: the free undead. First person piece concerning the Forsaken prior to the fall of the Lich King. Warnings for violence and suicide.
1. Prologue

Despite some reluctance, you find yourself in Tarren Mill, within the sanctum of the apothecaries. On the top level sits a desk turned ghostly with dust. Most drawers have been left slightly open, but one is shut fast. With some effort, it sticks, then gives.

Inside lies the still body of a frog. Its muscles tense at the movement of the drawer; its eyes roll up to look; it sees that it's you and relaxes once more.

Beneath it reams of notes are splayed. There are tables of results, lists of instructions, ingredients: mountain lion blood, bear tongue, mudsnout blossom. A rusted amulet has been wedged down one side, amongst stoppered phials and an old bench cloth, stained dirty green.

A book hides amongst the detritus. It's leather-bound, worn. _Considerations_ has been branded on the front, _G. Arcanus & A. Lydon_ just beneath.

The book pulls free easily enough. Within, there are charts and lists and diagrams. Between these, two alternating forms of equally scrawling handwriting rake across the page in sharp, straight lines.

This dominates a quarter of the book. Then come several blank pages. Another, dedicated to the experimental scribbling of a writer familiarising themselves with new ink. It's rusty brown, thick in places, dilute in others. You recognise it's blood right away, of course, and try not to think too deeply into that.

Instead you turn to the next page, where one of the first two writers resumes, their words stretched long. Sentences rove in distorted diagonals. Words are culled in vast swathes of scribbled deletions.

This book has been hidden deliberately, but the writer intended their work to be seen. The survivor of an opening paragraph slashed to ribbons by a pen nib, one sentence stands alone.

_Reader, I entreat you: keep this safe, when I forget._


	2. The Scholomance

Three weeks ago, I concluded my work in Arathi, suturing the holes in Hammerfall's staff with suitable members of the Forsaken. A doctor. A handful of deathstalkers, for the more subtle breed of excursions against Stromguard. An apothecary. The Defilers were far more grateful than the orcs, as was to be expected.

I left on horseback, and I stopped at Tarren Mill in Hillsbrad and the Sepulcher in Silverpine. I gathered reports from the executors and the deathstalkers and the apothecaries, and I bore their words back to Tirisfal and the Undercity. I gave an overview of the situation in all these Forsaken provinces to Shadowpriest Hargrave just this morning, and was to return to my efforts at bolstering Forsaken numbers through necromancy alongside the considerably more powerful Gunthar Arcanus.

These are the facts I remember clearly, but as I note even these events are beginning to fray, I fear for the rest. I write this because I suspect I am dying. Pathetic, I know, that suspicion is the most I can manage, especially when so many of those around me are unusually gifted with first hand experience of passing – of death – but it is not an ordeal I have truly undertaken myself.

So I only suspect I am dying, and I do so because my existence is unravelling. Whole sections of my memories are pulling away; even some of the most recent, the most dear, are too distant for me to recall just how I felt in each situation, just what drove me to each comment, each decision, each action. I see potential for so many varying opinions, and I cannot differentiate between them. I cannot tell which are mine.

So I must write. I must record everything that is yet as it should be. Even the things I have pushed to the back of my mind. The thought of passing on into nothingness has finally become abhorrent, here at the end.

We jostle over loose stones and unearthed roots. The axles creak and shift with every jolt. This is a meat wagon, meant for the dead, and it cedes to me no comfort. The sparse trees of Tirisfal are drawing closer together. From the ground, from the hidden second entrance into the bastion of the Forsaken, bats soar, the huge ones with their saddles and their riders accompanied by their smaller, squealing brethren. It is not late, but the low cloud cover over the glades seems to be enough to convince even the most stalwartly nocturnal that now is the time for flight. This is some forced form of twilight.

Krastinov did not wait until the night, as we are led to expect from the depraved. He dressed in rich red velvet and stood with a bloody purpose in his stance: an ape's strength in the solid arch of his neck into his shoulders; his weight ever braced on the balls of his feet; his head pushed forward; lips never quite meeting, so you could always see his teeth.

As Caer Darrow wailed and Krastinov chose first my father, then my mother, as his marks, I sat on the floor where a necromancer had thrown me, my left knee raw and bleeding, my body limp in the grasp of some black magic, and stared at the bright buckles on his boots, in awe of the craftsmanship, transfixed by the dark mist that splattered over them.

He liked to cut his subjects, and sew them back up. I know because he preferred to work with an audience, and I was both silent and attentive. He preferred the cleaver, I believe for the sound it made, the _chok _of the strike, the slap of parted meat, but he had also a serrated knife, a delicate scalpel and a saw.

The scalpel he used only to neaten the edges of things. If the cleaver did not cut as far as he had hoped, the scalpel parted the resisting flesh, and he would look up at me from time to time when he did this in particular, as though demanding that I revere his painstaking attention to detail. My father would roar with every strike. Mother's shouts had collapsed into the slightest whimpers, though every muscle in her body would shake and spasm as Krastinov washed the wound with his newest strain of ill-considered plague.

The man had no talent. I knew that even then, as a boy barely into his twelfth year. Not because I recognised the endless flaws in his methods, not because I understood that a great number of his compositions were illogical from theory through to practice, but because of the way he grinned when his blades cut into my parents. Krastinov lived for the infliction of pain, not for the advancement of science or the joy of academic rigour and success. Even the most downtrodden, mediocre Forsaken apothecary could have created his piteous attempts at poisons in a quarter of the time. Days instead of months. Krastinov would have looked at that apothecary's success, and in his eyes it would have been a failure. He was not striving for answers. He wanted only to extend his time to cut.

I survived primarily because of the spell one of the junior necromancers in the Scholomance forgot to free me from. It stole all the strength from me. My body lay in a state of prolonged exhaustion, and when my parents finally died in agony and Krastinov chose not to bring them back, when he turned to me, propped as I was against the bare stone wall, with his cleaver in hand, and when he brought it arching down, I did not shout, whimper, shiver or beg. I stared at my own wounds as I had stared at my father's, at my mother's, and I believe he finally recognised I had not been fixated on his work, a new monster to initiate into the fold, but gazing out because my mind had collapsed in on itself already, when they had first gathered the household together and dispatched us to our stations, not as human but as test subject.

The Butcher discarded me. I did not amuse him, and he had no time for experiments on uninteresting subjects. My wounds were left to bleed, and I was thrown into the corner with the dead. They took me, still breathing, down into the crypt, and left me there.

I would not die. My wounds clotted. I watched three initiates haul family friends from amongst the dead, carve away the flesh on their arms and sharpen their bones into points. They grafted limbs onto limbs and wrought bone scythes for their creations, and finally they struck the mangled bodies with dark magic that lifted the creatures up like puppets and gave them some twisted form of life.

The necromancers wanted more. They rifled through the mounds of bodies, seeking specimens with particular characteristics. Their next creature would be four times the size of its predecessors, and to achieve this they sought out the bodies with the longest limbs. They hauled people from the piles, inspected them, threw some aside and gathered the rest.

It was in this way that I came to realise my mother's corpse had been discarded to the crypt with me. It took two of the initiates to pull her out from beneath the colossal weight of my father, and they still had to push him aside to locate the leg the Butcher had hewn clear from her hip. In life, she had carried the crippling of her husband, the slow starvation of her children and a slew of miscarriages with her back iron-rod straight. Now, she sagged in the arms of the initiates, bloodied by the endless wounds Krastinov had inflicted and resealed.

They took their knives, and they carved my mother's flesh from her bones. They cut away the calluses on her palms and the tiny scabs on her fingertips from each weary slip of the needle, the stretch marks across her belly we children had left; they cut into the wrists she had preserved through willpower alone; and they cut away all evidence of every emotion that had crossed over her face, in her mouth and her wrinkles.

They slewed my mother's face from her skull, and delighted in the result. Her bones they bound with the bones of others. Scythes replaced her fingers. Black magic made her rise up and stand there, the great bone golem of the Scholomance, and her creators were oh so proud. They had the smaller prototypes gather around, and compared them all in size and strength, ever analytical.

They left them there with me, and took away the torches from the walls. In the darkness I lay immobilised, dribbling blood down my flanks and my arms, and listened to the sharp voices of the instructors in the room overhead, and the grating, shuffling noises of the creature they called Rattlegore and her smaller, hungrier brethren.

I survived not because of the spell that held me still and silent, numb, but because of the caster. He was someone I recognised. The innkeeper. Thin and listless, hair always in his eyes. He did not look out of place in the Scholomance, in the dark grey robe of a Scourge necromancer. He came down the stairs not long after the others had left, a lantern in hand, and he neglected to hold it high as he clambered over the corpses, oblivious to the new cuts and bite marks on the flesh of the dead. He hadn't my eyes. Likely he couldn't differentiate between the work of Krastinov and the mindless chewing of Rattlegore's undead.

My face, he recognised. The lantern swung above me, caught my bleeding, weakling body in a ring of light, and his drawn features lifted into a triumphant sneer. His eyes were sunken and in shadow; the veins and tendons in his face and neck, where I stared in frozen apathy, stood out beneath his white skin. Bloodless cleaver cuts marked his arms. His spell had asked too much of him, and taken its dues in flesh.

He did not get to remove it. Rattlegore's scythe burst through his chest before he had even recognised the creature was present. Blood struck me in sheets, bright, warm, wet: it woke me, as his life faded and with it all trace of his magic, and as the pain came back so did my strength, and the need to survive.

I waited until Rattlegore had eaten her fill. I took the man's robe, bloodied and torn as it was, and I pulled it down over my head. The sight of a familiar face, of someone like myself, dressed in the garb of the enemy fixed in my mind. I crept to the door, my whole body shaking, and I saw so clearly the path I had to take. You could say I was already well on my way to becoming an exemplary member of Sylvanas' Forsaken. I was only a little boy with his arm opened up and his ribs laid bare, hiding in robes too big for him, but revenge spread quickly through my blood.

My disguise, of course, fooled no-one. The tenacity that kept me on my feet with such injuries, instead, won their amusement, just long enough for my magical capacity to garner interest. I became an acolyte of the Scholomance. Without the numbing aid of the innkeeper's spell, I watched them torture people I knew from all over Caer Darrow, and later graduated to carrying the experiments out. And reader, hope that you will never feel the desperate last grasp of another human being, their fingers locked around your forearm, their eyes wide and pleading, as you stand on the verge of inflicting such suffering as will kill them from the shock alone. If it seems the act of hoping is not enough, get down on your knees before fate and beg.

Because I remember in particular the last moments of a woman whom I had never met before, some three years into my apprenticeship, when I was becoming both proficient at the creation of plague and darkly, sickly proud of this proficiency. She must have been middle-aged. Brown hair with the lightest streaks of grey at the roots, tinted now with blood from numerous strikes to the head, tied back at the nape of her neck; her face round and faintly lined, still dusty from the road, the outside world.

As I was working alone, my fellow initiates long since bedded down for the night, I did not hesitate before wiping away some of that dust on the pad of my thumb, holding it up and inspecting it, reflecting that the last time I had seen the open air, never mind the land itself, had been on a trip with my mother to the wooden dock that jutted out into the lake from Caer Darrow, armed with twine and her bottomless tenacity, with the water stretching out ahead of us as unmoving and reflective as glass, our bobbers floating in the sky.

'You can't be more than fourteen,' said the woman.

I turned my gaze from the past to her face, and to the imminent threat of the future sketched there in every line of desperation.

'Aye,' I said.

My voice had recently gained a tendency to break at intervals when I spoke. Unlike the other initiates, some of whom were experiencing similar rebellions in their vocal cords, I derived no particular embarrassment from the experience. Instead I was sure it only added to the desperation in my test subjects - not because it afforded me any particular presence, but because they would no doubt come to recognise the ridiculous nature of death, the lack of any grand meaning behind it. My victims would not die in the hands of a famed monster like Krastinov. Instead they would be killed senselessly by a boy with more control over their lives than his own voice.

'The same age as my son,' said the woman, and her voice too broke into an awkward rasp on the last word. She smiled at me. A pitying but not patronising smile. 'What's your name?'

'Alexander Lydon.' I saw no reason not to give it. The information was worthless. Everyone who knew Alexander Lydon was locked away in the Scholomance, and none of us would be of any help to her.

'Sand,' she said, and my mind deviated fleetingly back to the dock and the water beyond.

My mother struggled under the weight of abject poverty. Seven children and the income to feed one. She was a tall woman, any of the roundness that might have filled out the exhausted concaves of her cheeks stolen away by endless, thankless work; any of the energy that might have filled out the bitter concave of her heart stolen the night my father ruptured his knee and injured his back, and retired to permanent bed rest.

She fished for food when the weather was bitter and no-one else would be there as unwitting competition; she braved the hacking coughs to stitch clothes for copper coins; she spent hours preserving every uneaten scrap of food and scavenging to feed us. Dignity, she told me once, after she and I, as the eldest, were caught rifling through a neighbour's compost heap for the newest discarded shreds of peeled carrot and potato, was a privilege worth nothing in its own right. It was the food that fuelled the dignified people we should hope for, and if discarding dignity was the only way to have food, then dignity be damned.

Sometimes she had that particular fire to her, that determined grit. Other times, she stared at myself and my siblings as though we were a blight, struck my father in fits of desperation, and once sat in front of the window with a knife against her wrist, staring out for hours and ignoring every word I said.

In the end, it was my mother who took us to Caer Darrow, seeking employment for herself as a wet nurse and for her children as anything we were fit to do. On the day she took me down to the dock to fish, we had just earned the money for a full meal, and she didn't mind the other fishermen scattered along the pier for the first time in my recollection. She still gripped me by the ear when I, lulled by the gentle lap of the water and the distant song of birds in the trees, commented blithely that I could do stable work with half my brain pulled out and still get us a fancy chicken dinner with the proceeds. She crouched and pressed her face close to mine, and twisted my ear until I yelped.

'You listen to me,' she said. 'I don't care if you're twice as good at something than your neighbour, it don't mean shit to me unless you're as good as you can be. It's what you are compared to you that matters, nothing else. Reckon you're the best you can be, Sand? Reckon you're already what you want to be?'

The woman I was about to kill looked nothing like my mother, from the roundness of face to the wistful look in her eyes at the thought of her son, the one she said was my age. But perhaps she, too, would die under the weight of the fact that she had brought them both to this place.

'Let me go, Sand,' she said, reaching for my arm. 'Let me save him. Let me go.'

Had my mother begged for her life and mine? I recalled only the muted grunts she let out with each strike of Krastinov's cleaver, and the distant look in her eyes as she stared straight through me with poison in her veins. That was all end stage. Perhaps she had hoped for my preservation, before her flesh was cleaved open. I would spare this woman from that moment. The moment when her son faded from her mind, and all she came to care for was death.

'No,' I said. 'I will not.'

_A page has been torn out of the book, leaving a few ragged scraps of paper along the binding, all dark with ink from particularly heavy deletion. _

Undeath took me because, in my quest to destroy the Barovs, Kirtonos and their pit bull the Butcher, I added necromancy to my repertoire. I reasoned that if my own heart was so long-gone that I could stab a woman through hers without flinching, I had no reason to maintain the illusion of life.

I trained at twice the speed of my fellow initiates and that was roughly the best learning curve my potential would allow. It still took years before I moved from necromantic theory to practice, by which time my voice had ceased to break and settled instead at the lower end of tenor, my bones had grown at a rate my muscles could not match, so I stood at six foot three, skeletal thin, and my facial features had lengthened into the long, narrow configuration that I retain to this day.

No, I take the time to record these things simply because I retain them all to this day, so they will be continually relevant. Necromancy channels an unholy energy right through you, and that energy slowly drives out the ability to grow, to change, until your blood takes that as a cue to cease to flow, and coagulates in your heart.

I remember that moment simply as my first encounter with utter silence. Not once in my existence had I ever been without that rhythmic background pulsing. And then, in that instant, with the arcane, twisted almost past recognition, raging through me, it gave in. I watched my newest ghoul stagger to his ruined feet in front of me, and heard his snuffling, groaning, pain-stricken utterances with bright, intense clarity without something so simple as my pulse to distract me.

I lost my nerve in that moment. You recall I mentioned the lifting of an enchantment that had drugged me through my parents' deaths; in truth, its effects were chiefly physical. It was only when my heart gave out that I felt at last like the child I had been in the moments leading up to my family's entry to our gravesite. The terror, the twisting in my abdomen, the tightening in my throat: it rushed me all at once. I turned away from my creation; I strode from the room; I shook; in one last haphazard grasp at life my body began to sweat from every pore.

I recognised, in that instant, that I had given myself wholly to the destruction of another human being, however vicious, however monstrous he might be. And while that knowledge had been somehow bolstering in the seconds leading up to the very moment of my turning, while I had thrived on the thought that I would perform my duty to the very best of my capabilities, now that vengeance had sunk into my very flesh and starved it of all else, there was only panic. Years without fully engaging with my surroundings, with my actions, had left my mind blank of all coping tactics in this new state of awareness; the truth of it all struck me full-force, and I strode through the Scholomance without paying my fellow murderers any heed. And, by chance alone, I walked in on a disciplinary demonstration.

Twelve necromancers, all of whom I recognised as those peers whose power yet outstripped mine by a wide margin, stood before the new headmaster, Gandling, and Lady Barov, down in the enclosed courtyard between the main practice rooms. I stopped simply because I heard Barov's voice, and some foolishly preserved survival instinct told me to freeze, standing on the balcony above them.

I no-longer recall the details of their dispute, only that Barov and Gandling both wore expressions of mocking disgust, and that, when Gandling raised his hand, arcane power roared like lightning from his fingertips and cut through his apprentices before they could so much as cower back. It sliced into the stone behind them, splattered the wall with blood and blew whole chunks of masonry into dust. The room shook with the deafening retort, and the twelve necromancers crumbled into black grit on the flagstones.

It was power past anything I had imagined existing, and suddenly I realised the eight or nine years I had already thrown into my training in the Scholomance had not set me close to victory, but had provided me with only the starting point for decades of further study amongst these people. With that future blazing in my mind, I looked up, and there was Krastinov, standing on the opposite side of the balcony, looking down at the dead in the room below with sheer animal glee in his eyes, his white teeth bared. I stepped back and stumbled; he looked up, caught my gaze, and no recognition flashed across his face. The man whom I had hurt myself endlessly to kill did not even know I existed.

I left. I went up the stairs, I teleported past sentries and through closed gates, I broke the lock on the external door, and I left. The Scholomance was so indifferent to my existence that it put less effort into keeping me than it did into keeping its most useless human test subjects. After years encased in stone and in bitterness, I strode out of the keep, and into open air.

Caer Darrow lay before me in ruins. Roofs sported gaping holes, windows were broken, rust and damp and cobweb permeated every home. I advanced down the slope into the centre of the town. I passed the shattered spars of an old wagon left to rot and the cracked, dry remains of a marble fountain. Dead weeds protruded from gaps in bricks. The blacksmith had burned to the ground. A skeleton lay sprawled out on a doorstep. And above it all, far above my head, the sky was a low, sickly orange. I could not feel a breeze. I could not hear birds. I had spent all of my adolescent years preparing to defeat a man so far ahead of me that natural causes would take him before I ever could, and in that time all I had managed was to miss the passing of everything I knew into utter ruin. My family, I realised at last, were dead. In every way that mattered, so was I.

I gathered the broken pieces of roof slates and the rusted metal remains of horse's tack. I had no rope, but I had my belt and pockets full of Scourge apparatus: vials of contagion, chalk for runes, narrow-bladed knives in wooden sheathes; I threw them all aside, and replaced them with metal and stone until my robes strained under the weight. The slates I secured under my belt.

I walked to the pier, a wooden jetty extending out over the lake. The water was just as still as I recalled, though the planks beneath my feet were rotten almost through, and each step sent splinters rippling across its surface. I looked out across the orange sky, reflected there beneath me; I thought of all the fishermen thronged along the docks, my mother amongst them, before the Barovs betrayed them all; and, so disconsolate as to feel almost severed from my body, I took that last step. Out over the edge.

I twisted in the air as I fell; my hand shot out unbidden and grabbed at the end of the jetty. Splintered wood dug into my palm and the pads of my fingers; my shoulder jolted impossibly hard; and before I could stop it my right hand joined the left, scrabbling for purchase. My feet struck the water and my body recoiled, folding upward. A mindless kick caught the supporting wooden pillar to the right, and I pulled myself up higher, my muscles straining, a pathetic, hunkered creature hanging but a foot over the water, shaking.

Teleport, I thought. Do nothing by halves. I could easily have left my end, or my evasion of it, to apathy, by waiting for my limbs to find the strength to lift me, or to give way and let me drop, but somehow the notion of my one last action being so unbearably passive made me think only of my mother, the woman I had wanted so much to avenge, who had always fought, one way or another.

I gathered up my strength, let the arcane run through me, and blinked.

The water at the very middle of the lake struck me solidly. I had not anticipated it to have such a presence or consistency. I thought of water as light and crystal clear, but in seconds it had closed above me, the stones and the slates dragging me down, and the very weight of the water pressed in on all sides, crushing the air from my lungs and pushing my eyeballs back in their sockets. Darkness surrounded me, bright orange rippling far, far overhead, and black silt rose from the lake bottom as my heels struck the sand. My breath streamed away in a departing silver tide.

The water gushed in. It cornered and compressed pockets of air in my chest until they grew sharp as knives; stretched and distended my lungs and my stomach until they were fit to burst. And still more forced its way through my nose and my mouth. My body became leaden, weighted by an alien cold no living creature will ever feel. It spread out through my organs, through my blood, through the very marrow of my bones.

And yet, as that chill united every aspect of my being with a steady, grinding iciness, no dark patches flickered across my vision, only the flashing blue shapes as the lake pressed hard against my eyes. I felt no light-headedness, no burning need for oxygen. And I realised, as the currents of the lake gripped me, that my heart had stopped beating, and I had lost the good grace to drown.


	3. Travel

Say one thing for the Forsaken, say that a lot of us are _honest_.

Don't make that face. It might stick. And, alright, for all I know, reader, you're one of the orcs who took us on board as part of your Horde, and now you're as undead as I am (as I was, I suppose, hah) thanks to a little double-crossing and our Forsaken plague. How are you enjoying undeath, by the way? The stamina's something, isn't it? And I bet you green skins come in even more fetching shades nowadays. What a fashionable apocalypse.

But all-around dubious loyalty aside, there are a few Forsaken who have managed to see through the rage that blights the majority. They have come to recognise their underlying problems. And they're often honest about those. Mental health was always a taboo topic when I was alive. Now, well. What's that southerner saying? Why shy away from 'spilling your guts' about that pesky depression, those bothersome nightmares, the shakes, the bouts of amnesia, the sense of being somehow dislocated from your own body, the urges to find a way to hurt yourself that actually _works_, when your physical guts are moderately likely to have made a habit of spilling all on their own?

See, this is when you _laugh_, because I'm being _funny_. If that's not enough for you, then consider this: if my mother had been Forsaken, she might actually have found some reprieve in the ability to talk things through. It is such a very funny world. Makes you want to kick it, doesn't it? Right in its worldly bollocks.

You may think this is all a digression, reader, but you can shut your damn zombie-orc craw. I need to tell you a few things about myself, and you're probably going to think I'm an utter lunatic. The fact is this: I am, and I don't care if it makes you uncomfortable, because I am Forsaken. And because this is _my_memoir anyway, so damned if I know why I'm half-seeking your permission like this.

I haven't actually told anyone about my time in the Scholomance before. Not about my life in rural Lordaeron, either. I take it as a sign that my psychological state has healed further than I thought, that I successfully wrote so much of it down without having any major episodes. I specify major because, well. I'm on a meat wagon to hell. What the fuck do you expect.

I will test myself further. As you know, I had endured some seven or eight years of extreme violence, both as victim and perpetrator. Even before that, my family never really indulged in the sort of physical contact I had observed in some of our better-off neighbours. Although I slept in the same bed as all but the very youngest of my siblings, we were in the habit of eking out our own sections of the pallet and walling ourselves in with bands of rolled up clothing. Anyone who crossed the lines, intentionally or by accident, was eschewed by the rest for as long as our juvenile brains were entertained by the activity, calling out the disgraced sibling as clingy, weak, babyish.

The one occasion that a boundary was broken deliberately and mutually was on the night of my father's accident. There were six of us children then, myself at eight, my eldest brother almost two years behind, and the rest each a year younger than the one who came before them. I recall lying on my back in the gloom, listening to the in and out of everyone's breath, far too fast for any of them to be sleeping, someone muffling weepy hiccoughs in their hands.

Across the room, beside our parents' bed, our mother had been chanting, praying, calling the Light down through her and into the spluttering form of our father, laid out on the sheets with the firelight catching in his spilt blood. She had fallen silent now, exhaustion had lowered her to her knees in sleep, but none of us dared speak.

I remember catching sight of a sliver of the moon through the thinning thatch overhead and focusing on it as though my father's health hinged on my ability to stare, unblinking, into the moonlight. I would learn to use my magic, I vowed back then, not to fight or to stand beside gilded Dalaran magi, but to carve the silver down from the moon and use it to buy food, a house, a doctor.

It was in the midst of this thought that I felt a hand touch my shoulder. I startled, but only slightly: I was well-practiced at stifling myself, and waking my mother was unthinkable. The round, scared face of my eldest sister, Florence, loomed unusually close. She had crept over the wall of crumpled wool that divided us, and she lowered herself closer until she lay right against me.

I froze at first, awkward and unsure, and she was really no better off, just as fettered by inexperience as I, but she buried her face in my neck and that was enough to encourage some base instinct for familial affection within us both. I held her close, kissed her head and stroked her hair. She wove her arms around me and nuzzled my chest and throat.

The two of us spent the night curled up together, sheltering from our family's tragedy. And then we spent the next few months brutally ashamed. As Mother pulled Father back from the verge of death, we found a new source of fear: a secret certainty that Florence was surely with child.

What's all the more mortifying is that I know the damn process now. I know we'd done nothing in the least bit wrong, and yet I still feel illogically guilty about the whole thing. Touch is _difficult_ for me. I couldn't even lay out all my damn baggage on the subject if I tried, which I have.

The fact remains that living in a household with parents who put out a new child almost every year, dead or alive, and made inadequate effort to fully conceal the act made close contact into something dangerous to my mind. Then I spent years being struck with knives and books with metal edges and switches and arcane lightning, and striking with blades and poison, stripping away all bodily autonomy with metal chains and unholy power, and do you see? Do you see why it's difficult?

This is all relevant, reader, because I did not stay under Darrowmere forever. I could not have remained in the water for more than a few days at most, in fact, or I would have decayed past reconstruction. It felt like months, though. Years, even, all spent in a stupor, myself as an entity suggested only by the sickly dread that festered in the pit of my stomach, and the occasional passing strip of my skin torn free by the fish.

And then, quite suddenly to my mind, the darkness left, and I perceived the world turned on its side, the blurred shapes of trees growing horizontally, the sky an orange wall. The wet silt of the shore shifted to accommodate my cheekbone, and a considerable weight pressed down on my chest. I was shoved roughly in the shoulder, and rolled over onto my back.

A dark silhouette swung over me, pierced by two bright points of yellow light, and a hand gripped my chin, turning my head for inspection. I could feel all the liquid rolling about in my skull. It trickled from my ear, and the sound of the air and the waves came through to me in jolts, along with words conveyed in a Gilnean accent.

'Cult of the Damned, 'in't you.'

I coughed in response, and the man jumped back. As I fought to force the water from my lungs, he gave a disbelieving guffaw. His arms forced their way under mine and hauled me upright, my back against his chest and his fists against my diaphragm.

'You legend,' he said, compressing my chest until the flow of water bore with it a protesting wail: pitiful, really, but my lungs had softened in the lake and I could feel the flesh tearing inside me. 'Not even properly dead. Not even properly dead!'

He released me and I slumped face-first into the ground. My first breath of air was agonizing. It cut its way down my throat like a steel edge, serrated by the sand. I coughed and retched and lost track of the man's movements until I heard him speak again, this time from the left.

'You've been face down in a lake, mate, you don't need to do that.' A pause, as I spluttered on. He let out an irritated sigh. 'I mean it. Breathing 'in't useful. Give it up. Fact is, I've got a question, and you're going to nod, 'cause them lungs won't be worth buggery until they're dry, and I got no time for the waiting game, I'll tell you that.'

I let out a wheezing, garbled mess of sound. The whole situation was so beyond me that I'd given up trying to comprehend.

'Just nod for yes, and shake for no. Hell. It's not that hard. Come on now. Are you a necromancer, mate?'

I looked up at him. My sight was still blurry, but I could make out a strange grey pallor to his skin, and as I squinted to make sense of his eyes I came to realise they were empty sockets, filled with gold flame. Undead. I jolted away from him, only to collapse backward into the sand. He laughed again, but there was a hint of malice to the sound this time.

'Don't think you'll be going anywhere on them joints, with them muscles. Anywhere without me, that is.'

'Can't take me back.' My lungs were in ruin, but my panic was such that I managed to force out the words nonetheless, wheezy and rasping.

'Back? You a runaway? Scourge escapee, are you? Well then, that's some shared ground between us, innit. I am too.' He snatched up my hand and shook it vigorously, his teeth bared in a broad grin. 'Edgar Cross. Well met.'

I flinched, but it did not deter him.

'What I'm still looking to know, though, mate, is whether you're one of them necromancers, or just an untrained lackey. You didn't sweep the floors, you raised the dead. Right?'

In my bewilderment, in my dislocation, the danger in such an admission did not even occur to me. I stared. And I nodded.

Cross's grin spread to maniac proportions. 'Oh, mate. You don't know how bloody happy that makes me to hear. You and me, Scourge, we're going t'get along like a house on fire. Just you wait and see.'

* * *

><p>As I could not walk, Cross opted to carry me. You see, now, the relevance of my digression. I spent days in forced contact with the man, his shoulder pressed firmly into my stomach, my head knocking against his shoulder blade with every step he took. Water found its escape through my damn face: I coughed at first, until apathy led me to hang there with my mouth open, water running over my swollen tongue and gathering behind my teeth, still more seeping through my nose and from behind my eyeballs. It was painful and unnatural and relentless, and nothing compared to human contact.<p>

I expected him to hurt me. I expected him to strike me at any moment, and focusing on that phantom attack pushed me to the point at which the very absence of agony became painful to me. It didn't seem to matter that my nerves were shot. My imagination was happy to improvise.

I wished he would just hurry up and do it. The metal clank I heard with every other step he took was so beautifully generic that he could have been carrying anything. With a sword, he could take off whole limbs. With a serrated knife he could shred my flesh and I could do nothing to stop it, as restrained by my ruined body as a prisoner bound and chained.

I noted also the particular sound of his footsteps, far removed from the precise click of boot heels over stone floors: no, he was crossing soft soil instead, which might make precise cuts that bit harder. But then I heard the rustle of leaves and the crackle of snapped twigs too, and that meant there were surely trees about. One of their trunks might make an adequate chopping board. He could take off my fingers, one joint at a time. Best done with a cleaver, I thought, for the _chok_.

He didn't. Instead he spoke to me. He maintained, with only fleeting pauses, a litany of often jokingly-made complaints and idle banter. Although I missed the majority of it completely, far too busy being out of my mind, I nevertheless perceived that my uselessness as a travelling companion was a reoccurring topic.

'Not that I blame you too much, mate, what with all the water that came out of them lungs, but what I'd say's standard practice is to smile and nod at the very least, right, which doesn't take anything at all from your voice, does it, but I 'in't picked up on much nodding.' A pause. 'Come on, then! Practice!' Another pause. 'Fine, y'Scourge wanker, I'll just appreciate all this pretty plagueland of yours without you.'

Not only did he persist in attempting to engage me in conversation, but he stopped to rest with unusual frequency as well. He'd seat me on the ground, not particularly gentle but clearly making sure he didn't damage me outright, and arrange my limbs to keep me upright. This proved most difficult the first time we stopped, when I was at my very weakest and my very worst.

'Dark Lady bloody help me,' he muttered as I slumped to one side, then to the other, when he attempted to straighten me up. 'Come on, I know you've got a spine in there somewhere. You remember rigor mortis? Well, alright, neither do I, but you could give it a shot, eh?'

I couldn't. My muscles were sodden and useless, and it was all I could do to roll my eyes up toward him. Even that gesture did me little good. He was still nothing more than a blur of black and blond against the dark wash of the landscape. I struggled for a few seconds to bring him into focus, but it was a futile effort. Mentally exhausted, I allowed my eyes to fall shut.

Not half a second later, Cross elbowed me in the side. Rather than flinching, I gave an embarrassing shudder, and awaited the next strike, the proper strike.

'If anyone's earned sleep, it's me, alright?' said Cross instead. 'Carrying your bony carcass all this way. Got days of walking ahead, too. Going to be murder on my back.'

Then came one of his pauses, which I had only just started to recognise as a prompt for me to speak. I held my tongue, unnerved by these attempts to turn his dribs and drabs of single-singed chatter into some form of dialogue between us. I had no idea how to hold a conversation, even with such a generic figure as someone who would soon be cutting me up. In fact, my brain stammered at the mere thought of another person wanting to hear anything out of me at all.

'Not much good at the old sympathy business, are you,' he said without particular malice. 'Lucky bastard. That'll probably make being Forsaken a damn slight easier.'

This was not the first time he had made use of the word forsaken, but as he settled down nearby it lodged in my mind. Forsaken by what, forsaken by whom? My thoughts circled the topic. There was something not quite right about it, something I chased hopelessly as I sat in a heap on the ground. It was only a sharp metallic ring that drew me from my thoughts.

'Easily startled, in't you,' said Cross.

I turned my near-blind head toward him, and made out a familiar grey gleam in his hands.

'Just sharpening my daggers, mate. Nothing to worry about.'

Until well after he hefted me back onto his shoulders and continued the trek, I thought only of knives, and their optimal application.

* * *

><p>'Didn't you hear me the first time?'<p>

It was the fourth day of travel by Cross's account, although my putrefying eyes, vision worse by the hour, had registered no change in the dull orange light. He thrust his face close to mine, and even then I was barely aware of his proximity until his rancid breath struck my cheeks.

My flesh, at least, had started to dry, and some sensation had trickled back into once-numb nerve endings. It was nothing intense, but a greater sense of the tactile world had allowed me, over the two days in which the drying of my flesh had started to yield noticeable improvements, to become a little less absorbed in morbid introversion, and a little more aware of my surroundings. I had, however, refrained from speaking a word, and Cross's temper had started to fray.

'Sleeping privilege is mine. If you want some shut-eye, you better do it while I'm walking.'

I had, indeed, allowed my eyes to slip shut as I sat, propped against a fallen tree, on one of our many breaks. Now I raised my gaze in his general direction, and could barely differentiate between his dark armour and the trees amongst which he had sought cover from the road.

'Are all you necromancers this lazy?' Cross slumped down against a tree trunk, and I lost sight of all but those burning eyes. 'I've met a couple of arcanists in the city and, alright, they do a lot of reading books, but they read those books with _enthusiasm_, do you get me?'

I stared at him blankly, and his eyes rolled.

'Moronic question, alright, alright, you wouldn't know enthusiasm if it slapped you in the face. It's what happens when you give a shit about something, mate. Ever managed that? Working with a grin? You ever done that?'

This led me back into my head for a moment as I reflected on my work at Caer Darrow: the promise of food at the end of physically challenging labour; the earthy warmth of the stables; the sheer strength inherent in every sinew of the horses' muscles; and the soft regard of their brown eyes as I brushed and fed them. Caring for the beasts had been fulfilling in a way I had never known while scavenging.

Thinking back on that time, however, inevitably led my thoughts around to the bloody end of it all. I roused myself from contemplation before I could accidentally disturb memories the lake had kindly compressed into dark sediment at the very bottom of my mind.

Cross was still speaking, presumably having circled back to his arcanist acquaintances, as he asked me, 'You know the Kirin Tor, right?'

In the blank transitionary period between introspection and the present, I broke my silence unthinkingly. 'Aye.'

Cross's gaze, which had been drifting carelessly over the ground, darted back to me in surprise. 'You do, eh?' His tone was carefully casual.

'The arch mage.' The sound of my voice held more value to me than the meaning of my words; I spoke carelessly, listening to the deep grating rumble that underlined all I said. 'Kel'thuzad.'

'Oh aye,' said Cross bitterly, although his tone tightened into dark amusement soon enough as he continued. 'I'll bet you two were proper mates, right. Tea and cake in the Scholomance every Friday. Right?'

Cross's crass, joking supposition was so completely incomprehensible that my mind simply seized. Or maybe I'd be better off saying that I was already poorly connected to my surroundings, and his stupid little joke severed my last mooring, catapulting me into open space. Anyway, as I said, I am insane. I was all the more insane back then. I cringed when Cross stood back up; felt a strange, but not unfamiliar, misery sweep over me as he swung me across his shoulders, helpless once more; and finally managed to force myself back into the present when the sky was kind enough to change.

It did so slowly, orange muting steadily into the hazy grey-brown of an overcast sunset. I felt Cross's head rock back on his neck to regard it, and cringed at the touch.

'Bulwark soon,' he muttered. My return to silence had rendered him sullen.

I had no idea what a bulwark might be, and was ready to discard the thought – until unfamiliar voices sounded out, all as ragged and raspy as Cross's, and I found myself suddenly outnumbered and startlingly afraid.

'Put that damn crossbow _down_!' snarled a female voice. 'That's one of ours, or have you ever seen the Scourge carrying their own? Have you? Well?'

'No,' said a deeper, scalier voice begrudgingly. 'Ma'am.'

Cross lurched to a halt. 'Appreciated, Vandis. How's things, eh? Seen a lot of action lately, or's the crossbow just for show?'

'I use it plenty,' muttered the man.

'Rotten,' said the woman called Vandis, 'but not all the way through. This is a nice chokepoint. We've had a few attacks from the Scourge remnants in the east, and a few from those damn crusaders in the west, and they were all deliciously easy to defeat.'

'I like the stakes,' said Cross, nodding. 'If you stood them a bit more upright, you'd actually be defending a wall from both sides. Sounds like fun, eh?'

'This land will be unified under her majesty's banner soon enough, little man, don't you doubt it.' A slight pause, then: 'So. Is that your excuse for a bushel of Scourge heads?'

Cross's shoulders rolled beneath me, and I tensed insofar as my ruined body would allow.

'About those heads – you'll have to wait on them. Saw this poor sod afloat in Darrowmere and could hardly leave him, could I? Even for the whim of a beautiful lady.'

'Even for the coin of a bulwark captain, you mean,' said Vandis.

I heard steps and the rustle of cloth, and thrummed with the knowledge that someone was far closer to me than I would ever like.

'One of ours?' she asked.

'No, I thought I'd go ahead and help the Scourge through our defences,' said Cross blithely. 'Or wait, not that – the Alliance.' He lowered his voice conspiratorially. 'He's not actually dead.'

'You don't amuse me, Cross,' said Vandis, and there was something hard in her tone that verified her words.

'Well, fine. Could you do me a favour and fix him up a bit? It'd help if the fellow could walk, you know?'

'No,' said Vandis. 'No, you get a move on. And if you see any of the living – you cut out their hearts for me, and don't bother me with jokes about them.'

It will come as no surprise to you that these were Forsaken soldiers, those stationed on the border between Tirisfal and what is now the Western Plaguelands. At the time I was not so well-informed. It was a mystery to me which faction these people could belong to if they were against both the living and the Scourge.

Animated at last by curiosity, I struggled to push myself upright and managed to turn my head to look at her. She was a slighter silhouette than Cross, but just as undead.

'Who are you?'

'Shadow priestess Vandis,' she snapped. 'You should teach your charge to listen, Cross.'

'No. What faction. Race.'

A moment's silence, in which Vandis glanced to the burly man on her left and then to Cross himself.

'A member of the free undead who does not know his own people?'

'He hit his head, fell in a lake. Blind luck that I found him, really. I did ask you t'fix him. He knows fuck all as he is.'

Vandis stared for a moment more, before turning about and waving for Cross to follow. 'Bring him here. I'll see what I can do.'

Working on and off, with no real deference to night or daytime, it took Vandis two days to 'fix' me to Cross's satisfaction. The first twelve hours I spent flat on my back, incurring her wrath with every flinch and shudder. Couldn't I see that she was trying to help me, she wanted to know. Couldn't I see how much easier this would be if she didn't have to hold me down? My reaction was due to my state of helplessness and the proximity of the death magic she used to patch me up, of course, so it was nothing I could contain, not until my muscles were sufficiently repaired to let me sit up.

When that changed, so did my behaviour. Sitting amongst unknowns was, when I thought about it, an improvement after a decade surrounded by people I knew to be evil. Vandis's mood picked up when she no-longer had my flinching to contend with, and she idly fed me names that meant nothing to me at the time: the Forgotten Shadow, Sylvanas and, yet again, the Forsaken.

It was, in fact, almost pleasant to be spoken to, as Cross tended to take over what would have been my side of the conversation. He disguised my affiliation with practiced ease. I was an infiltrator, he told Vandis, and bored her with the fine details of my discovery by the Scourge and subsequent trip into Darrowmere, swearing loyalty to the Queen right up until the final splash.

'Which practically makes him a hero of our cause,' he said, slapping me on the shoulder.

I began to suspect this particular kindness was actually a threat, but all I could do was nod along and wonder: which queen and what cause?

But I'm not as slow as you probably think. They'd mentioned free undead, and I became increasingly sure that this was some sort of splinter group. My mistake was that I presumed they were once ranking members of the Scourge: those who retain rational thought. It seemed unthinkable that drones, that fodder, might somehow escape the Lich King's grasp. And so I placed Vandis as one of the Cult of the Damned's shadowcasters, as it was dark magic she used to strengthen me. Cross, I presumed, had been an infiltrator. Which I suppose isn't all that far from the truth.

It was as I mused on this that Cross himself asked, so casually I did not really absorb the words until later, 'What about his eyes?'

Vandis's tone was equally calm. 'Obstruction at the best. Here. Watch and learn.'

She bore down upon me with immeasurable strength, although I would have to lie to say I struggled with any force. She'd caught me too much by surprise for that. Cold fingertips forced back my left eyelid and sliced into the eye itself. I felt her fingernails bore grooves in the socket as my eyeball distorted in her grasp. Something popped and shifted inside – the lens displaced. I thrashed and bellowed to no avail. Vandis tightened her grip and _pulled_. Something wrenched deep in my skull: a cord or a tendon. I felt the length of it move within my head. It wrenched and it pulled and it tore, and she ripped my eyeball away.

My whole body convulsed. The pain might have been minimal with my nerves dulled by undeath, but the combination of wrenching and tearing was utterly sickening. And then there was the sight of my own eyeball in someone else's bare-bone fingers, the nerve swinging beneath it and splattering my face with blood.

Sight. Proper sight: when I closed my remaining eye, everything became clear and crisp. No more blurring. Colours were reduced to ashen versions of their original hues, but I could still make them out just about. Shaking, frozen, I looked left, then right. The sense of your eyeball moving, the muscles tensing and relaxing, is another of those things you only come to notice when they're gone. I felt no movement in my empty socket, but I perceived that my line of sight shifted as I commanded nonetheless.

This was a misunderstanding on my part, but one that is typical to those unused to sight through necromantic spell. In truth, unless you were raised by a particularly stupid necromancer, your sight is actually as panoramic as the restrictions of your skull itself will allow. The sense of looking one way or the next is more to do with focus: a human focuses on one point and only processes the area around that point in full. Learning to look at everything in front of you is difficult, and best left to time.

I digress. I swept my focus from left to right, and saw the Bulwark as it then stood: logs sharpened to points standing from the ground at angles to protect the defenders on both sides; soldiers in Lordaeron mail standing with their backs to me, armed with swords and crossbows; the ground still churned and muddy from the relatively recent passing of armies; and Vandis and Cross standing over me.

Vandis had shallow features, matted black hair and empty pits for eyes, her skin lifeless grey and pitted cross the cheeks and forehead. Cross was taller and further decayed. His flesh was mottled green and purple as though bruised all over. From forehead to the hinge of his jaw the left side of his face had torn away to the bone, which itself bore fractures in which black ooze had gathered. His long blond hair was well-tended but thinning, the shape of his skull very clear underneath. He wore leather armour in black and grey, and carried not one blade but two: a short sword and a dagger.

'Much better, am I right?' Cross's grin really did reach all the way up to his ear, the ragged injury gaping open.

'We can do the other in your own time,' said Vandis, 'though it's easier without the anticipation.'

It was unsettling, seeing the rotten undead speak, but not so much as to tear my attention away from this bizarre new idea that pain can lead to immediate reward. I reached up to my eye socket and felt a gathering of thick blood there, but also my own necromantic energy fluttering around my fingers. Pain had always been part of something long-term. _Through this suffering, I shall become a great necromancer; through your suffering, I will devise poisons and plagues._ In the future. Always in the future. Sight had come instantaneously.

'Give me an hour,' I said, wanting time to steady myself, to grow used to my new vision.

I lasted fifteen minutes at the most, before my desire to experience this new novelty overcame me, and I begged her to tear out my last eye.

* * *

><p>We left the Bulwark and Vandis not long after, and trekked down into the perennial dusk of Tirisfal Glades. The road was lost back then. Thousands of passing feet had widened it into a track of trampled grass and churned soil so broad it stretched all the way amongst the trees, coating their trunks in dust as high as I am tall. I spied lost armour and weaponry beaten down into the ground, and found myself indistinctly aware of the dead left there as well, although all I ever saw of them was the back of someone's head crushed into earth, hair so choked with dirt I believe Cross failed to notice it at all.<p>

I watched the few houses we passed, searching for signs of life that never showed. Farmsteads, too, lay in ruin, reduced to squares of trampled crops hemmed in by fence posts standing bereft of their adjoining beams.

'All at the capitol, most likely,' said Cross by means of explanation for the silence. 'That's where we're mostly hiding now, though I hear they're gathering uncertains up in the west, and some of us are getting back cosy in Brill. 'S one of the old towns; wasn't caught too heavy by the army.'

'Uncertains?'

'People who're maybe survivors, you know. Might come around yet, might not. The queen's got no interest giving up on anyone.'

I looked over the desolate sweep of the surrounding land and tried to imagine it as somebody's domain. It was a futile effort.

'Y'still haven't said which queen,' I reminded him.

Cross laughed. 'Mercy. You're just too bloody clueless, aren't you. Did they not tell you anything about the world when you were down in that shithole, or were you just not listening?'

I shrugged, although I knew it was a combination of the two. There had been some talk of the Scourge outside the Scholomance, but nobody had made a great effort to keep me informed, and when I'd come close to overhearing I'd always tuned it out. The outside world was nothing to me. It was something I'd given up.

'Someone smarter can tell you about the queen,' said Cross. 'There'll be plenty of them, down in the capital.'

I accepted this. I did not question 'down', and I did not wonder after the people we would soon be meeting. I hadn't even the slightest inkling of what I would soon find, when he took me into the bastion of the Undercity.


	4. Introduction to the Undercity

The Undercity we reached was nothing like the underground fortress you are no doubt familiar with today. There were no lifts, no modified entranceways. No guards, either. Instead, Cross led me through the vast front gates into Lordaeron city, across a plaza and on into the ruins of the streets. The houses there were tall, narrow and closely packed together. From the raised gate through which we entered, I could see row upon row of terraces following the curve of the outer wall far into the distance.

The thought of so many human beings living so close together was initially baffling, then sickening. I thought of the plagued falling from windows and through front doors, amassing in the street: four, five, six to a house. And, for the first time, the potential scale of the Scourge swarm I had helped to create began to dawn on me.

In stunned, wretched silence, I followed Cross. He took us along a narrow road. Between the cobblestones I saw the fading stains of blood; in the houses, broken pots and splintered wood. At first glance, it seemed the swarm had left all the signs of a massacre but the bodies.

'Now, this is where it gets a bit dodgy, right, but you're just going to have to bear with me.'

We had reached the end of the row, and Cross knelt just in front of me, where the gutter running alongside the raised pavement met a heavy metal grate set into the wall. He grasped the thick iron bars, grunted, and heaved the whole fixture away. A low, darkened hole remained, with the muddy water in the gutter trickling on through.

'Thinking positive,' said Cross speculatively, 'everyone's dead, so there 'in't much in the way of mess to slog through, if you get my meaning.'

I went through first so he could pull the bars back into place behind us. The stone walls were slick with dark ooze, and I found myself increasingly sceptical of the truth in Cross's positive thinking with each squelching step. Apparently years surrounded by blood and gore and misery had failed to numb me past disgust, because my movements became increasingly cautious, mincing even. Cross's derisive snicker echoed far down the dank tunnel.

'Come off it, you pussy. Go left, I think. Or right. Ah, get out of the way, mate, it's best I do this by instinct.'

Again he took the lead, and we made our way through the ground inside the labyrinthine tunnels of Lordaeron's sewer system, backtracking often, our path only halfway lit by ghostly fire in empty brackets hammered into the walls. Finally we came to a place where the bricks had been pulled away, bearing an open wound through the black earth. We advanced through, the hem of my new robe dragging in the mud, until brightness bloomed ahead and we dropped down into an open chamber.

Overspill from the sewer splattered onto the grey marble floors; an inch of water covered the flagstones all the way to the far door. Alcoves in the walls housed statues of past kings, sombre in their stone robes and discoloured brass crowns. Wreathes crowded their pedestals, some old and withered, some so new I had to wonder who could possibly have been alive to place them. Someone had smeared the old kings' faces with the same brown slime that coated the floor.

'And then we go this way...'

We pressed onward through the royal catacombs, past further statues treated to tribute and desecration, and Cross spoke of the Scourge as we went. Prince Arthas had meant to keep the capital for himself even after his defection, as a seat of power for his undead forces. Prince Arthas had ordered the Scourge to dig deep, carve a city from the tombs, sewers and dungeons, make a place once inhabited only by the poorest of his people worthy of the most wretched. Which made Cross laugh aloud as he said it.

'So that's what we're bloody well doing.' He pointed toward the nearest statue, its base anointed with wine and its crown stolen from its head. An apathetic king, his face stained green from forehead to chin. 'Maybe because these fuckers are still around. Just swapping one king for another and another and another, like it's always been.'

'But you said there's a queen.'

'And not exactly a royal one neither, that's right. Guess we'll see how that goes, eh.'

From the royal tombs we descended a vertical tunnel by means of a rope segmented with heavy knots to aid the climb. It was only a short journey through darkness, but the closeness and warmth of the earth set a sudden lethargy in me, as though my body yearned to stay there, in conditions befitting a final resting place.

The shock of the drop brought me out of any weariness. One moment I was held close by the soil, the next I was hanging by nothing more than a rope, with ten metres of open air just below.

I froze for an instant, staring: we had come through a hole in a vaulted stone ceiling, supported by tall, thin block pillars that ran all the way to the ground far below. Huge flagstones paved the floor as far as I could see; green liquid oozed through a canal close by; there were sheltered alcoves and arched bridges and none of that really _mattered_ in the moment, because the area below teemed with people.

People shifting rubble, people digging, people attending to the fine detailing of the masonry. They all wore the grey skin and flaming eyes I had seen in Cross, Vandis and her soldiers. Here toiled the citizens of Lordaeron: the corpses I had failed to see above ground, amongst the debris of a massacre. The Forsaken.

Until that point, I think I had expected survivors. There was no doubting the existence of some free Scourge - Cross alone proved that - but I had envisaged some sort of shared society where the living still outnumbered the undead. The thought that everyone had died, _everyone_, was something I hadn't dared let into my mind.

But it was there now, and I made my way down the rope in a daze. Cross was waiting for me at the bottom, his fingertips idly drumming against the hilts of his blades.

'For a second there I'd figured you had a problem with heights,' he told me. 'Seemed pretty likely, the more I thought about it. But I s'pose we've found one thing that doesn't scare you, eh?'

'Is everyone like this,' I said. I meant it as a question, but my voice refused to lift.

'What, petrified? Some of them. Maybe not as badly as you, though, even then.'

'No. Dead. Undead.'

'Oh, that.' Cross gave the sort of slow, absent-minded nod I expected from a farmer idly discussing the success of a crop. 'A few nicked south in time and of course my lot are mostly holed up happy behind the Wall, far as I know, but everyone who stayed, aye. I'd say they're all dead.'

'How far?' I asked, and had to clarify when he gave me a quizzical look. 'How far'd the Scourge reach? How far's all dead?'

'Silverpine to Stratholme, I think. Oh, and up into the elf lands too. Knackered their capital, or so I'd heard. Think some of them made it, though. Probably helps, having magic instead of pitchforks and that. You telling me you didn't know that neither, sitting snug with your schoolmates?'

I shook my head, no. I'd tested and mixed and helped stockpile plagued grain in ignorance, although I felt sure that, had I cared enough to enquire, several of the senior members of the Scholomance would have been more than happy to boast about the master's plan. And then I might have worked against it from the inside. Perhaps I could have neutralised some of the stock. Saved a few lives.

So this, Silverpine to Stratholme, was the price of apathy. Worse still, as we made our way along the canal side, I felt some foul prickling in my chest. A sort of sick satisfaction. All those fat merchants. All those smug farmers. I hoped, suddenly, that they'd recognised what was happening to them, that they'd known what was coming. I hoped it had hurt.

We passed civilians who very clearly hadn't belonged to either group, farmer or merchant. The sight of ragged clothing, rounded shoulders and sunken faces caused the dark vehemence that overtook me to putrefy into a rank, rotten discomfort down in my chest. It did not matter one bit that I was no mastermind, that I had never purposefully set out to spread the plague in full consideration of the repercussions. These people were still my victims. All of them, my victims. Intent was the only thing different between me Krastinov, and as intent was one of those internal, invisible things, it meant nothing. There was nothing to separate the Butcher and me.

'Oi.' Cross, slowing up ahead to look back for me. 'No reason for you to be falling behind, mate. Not with that stride of yours, eh?'

There was a stone slab off to the side of the main walkway, in the centre of one of the alcoves. Built originally to display a body, maybe. I headed over to it and sat.

'Look, come on. Get up. The Undercity 'in't pretty, but we've got business here, alright. We've got to see to it.'

'Business.'

'Aye, that's what I said. There's a whole group of people who'd really like to give a job to a necromancer like you, mate, and it'll probably get me one too, alright, so we can't be sitting around or we'll miss out.'

So here was the real motivation behind the actions of Edgar Cross. I was a pawn to be traded for some sort of employment. It did not hurt me any. If anything, it allowed him to settle as a reliable part of reality. This man, I felt, was now openly manipulative. I could believe in him, couldn't I. He made sense.

'Staying here,' I told him, and for all that he cajoled me, I would not be moved.

I sat on that block for two days, alone, as Cross departed after half an hour at most, declaring that he would bring them to me if I would not go to them. I'd like to make out that I came to some great revelation about my work amongst the Scourge, but I didn't. It was mostly wasted time.

I watched the free undead. I was used to the sight of ghouls and other deeply rotten minions, so the injuries of the Forsaken workers did not faze me in and of themselves. I saw the stumps of severed arms; fingers worn down to the bone; open cuts of all kinds darkly festering; skin that roiled with the maggots underneath; jaw bones torn clear away, leaving dry tongues to slap against pallid necks; faces without flesh; sockets without eyes; hair working its way steadily free of the scalp; skeletal limbs; a man who had lost all his organs, so his belly was nothing more than a bloody gap; and more unidentifiable kinds of bodily discharge than most Living can probably imagine.

The difference lay in their reactions to all this damage. The mindless always staggered around without any recognition that they were injured. But the Forsaken knew. I saw a wide range of attempted repairs. A great number of people wore makeshift bandages to hide their cuts. I saw a woman who had secured her arm, torn from its socket, to her side with leather straps, useless but still a part of her. There were masks and gloves and high collars meant to spare them the sight of their own dead skin.

I even watched the man with the missing gut pack the hole with wool and hold it in place with a new sheet belly he stitched directly into his flesh-and-blood flanks. His stitches were awful. I imagined they would hold for a few days at best. But then he pulled on a metal breastplate, hiding his work, and it became evident it probably wouldn't matter. The surgery had been a mental reassurance and, as long as that breastplate stayed on, he would be none the wiser if his bloodless new gut pulled free.

Can you imagine waking up into the body of a ghoul? You've endured a distant nightmare, and you wake to rot and hideous injury. And as you're panicking, as you're praying you wake up or break free, it slowly dawns that this body is yours. You look at your own limbs, or at your reflection in the still surface of a lake, and you see yourself in death. I saw the resulting desperation, hollowness, in some of these Forsaken.

Other repercussions of mindlessness lingered too, particularly in some mirrored behaviours I noted amongst those working. They'd dig with such intensity and stamina that they cleared five of the giant alcoves in the short time I sat nearby, but between tasks I noticed a few of them standing stock still, staring aimlessly into space until someone else gave them fresh orders. I think some were sufficiently used to the voice of their commanding necromancer whispering new demands right into their muscles that they struggled without them.

This didn't apply to everyone. A man sitting with his back to a wall droned on about the futility of the work. Another reappeared a few times over the two days, asking after his wife: had anyone seen her? She was brown-haired and pregnant, had anyone seen her? The baby might still be alive, he told me, grasping at my shoulder. The baby hadn't eaten any grain, had it, so there was still a chance. I would tell him, wouldn't I, if I'd seen her? I'd tell her he was looking, if I saw her later on?

It was only on his final visit that one of the most relentless workers, a muscular man with a broken arm, stopped digging to whirl around, grab the lost husband by the front of his shirt, and spit into his face.

'I seen your wife,' he snarled in a heavy city accent. 'I meet your lady in the swarm, and I hold her down, and I eat her belly and I eat your kid, so shit on you and all your whining. Never gonna see them again, boy.'

He hurled him aside. The man gave a strangled yelp as he struck the floor, then curled up like an injured animal, shuddering. The worker rounded on everyone else, the tendons standing out in his bloodless neck as he bellowed.

'And that goes for all of you! Never gonna see your dead spawn or your friends or your fucking other halves! I fucking ate the lot of them, and you're all better for it! It'll make it easier when you all rot down to mulch like you're fucking meant to.'

'Kindly keep your nonsense to yourself.'

The new speaker put herself between the crying husband and the angry undead. Not two steps away, she had to tilt her head all the way back to look the aggressor in the eye: despite ash blond hair deliberately fluffed up to feign extra height she was no more than five feet tall, and he towered over her.

'Nonsense? All I'm saying's sense. 'Cause we're dead.' He leant down toward her until there was barely a gap between their faces. 'The dead do nothing but rot.'

The air seemed to darken around them.

'Stand back.'

She pushed him lightly in the chest, and the worker stumbled back two steps as though forcibly shoved. As he started, glancing about, she continued.

'It's rather funny you should say that, really. Look around you, sir, at the work you yourself have been doing, and that your peers continue while you waste time turning on your own brethren. Just as you carve out these halls, so will the Forsaken carve out our very place in this world. Is that, do you think, the behaviour of a race doomed to merely rot away to nothing?'

The man's face twisted into a sneer and he leaned toward her again, although I note he neglected to retake those two steps forward. 'Race? You think we're a race?' And he tipped back his head and guffawed.

If not for my imminent demise I'd expect to regret writing this, but I have to admit that, although initially impressed by her bravery in standing against someone who'd already proved to be violent, I found myself taking the worker's side. There was something familiar about her words, something bolstered by her educated accent. Here was one of the elite, descending to tell the common rabble to be happy in their pisspoor state, and to look forward to a future of success through unity. Of course, in this case she wasn't just a condescending supporter of the hierarchy, she was suggesting undeath might be enjoyable. I figured she was probably out of her mind.

She waited for his laughter to stop, her head tilted back, her expression fixed, her back straight and her hands trembling almost imperceptibly, until she held them still by crossing her arms over her chest. Most of the work had ceased all around them. Even the destitute will usually spare a moment to watch a free show.

'Ah. Do you know what a race is?' she said, and her voice started small. She forced it to grow. 'A people united by common descent, by common traits, by common _history_. We share the same state. We share the same time spent amongst the Scourge-'

'Rot. All of you hear that? She reckons we're all bound together by our precious rot.' He looks around at the others, brows arched high, as though to draw them into his victory.

'Yes.'

His head snapped around at that. 'Yes? Lady, that's a bad thing. Did you forget what "bad" means maybe? D'you need some help with the basics, huh?'

'Don't try to tell me something you perceive as "bad" is necessarily dividing. If, ah, you think about it... I think you'll find shared grievances draw people together quite commonly. Demonstrably. War, disaster, distaste for some form of authority. I think there's quite some evidence to support a basic human joy being found through complaint. Besides, you're too quick to dismiss all the strengths this new state may yet provide, and you ignore the fact that this is essentially an extension of existence far more often denied to victims of war-'

Whatever agreement she might have won with the start of this speech, and there was some, I saw it in the thoughtful expressions that passed over a handful of faces, was decimated by this last line. Her opponent wasn't alone when he guffawed this time. Though the other Forsaken did not laugh, criticism surged from them in a sudden roar, forcing her to take a step back.

'Strengths!' The worker found great amusement in the word, it seemed. His voice soared above the racket. 'Strengths.'

'There _is_ something to be had here,' I heard her snarl, the vitriol in her tone just enough to pierce the noise, 'you _will_ come to appreciate it soon enough.'

She turned on her heel and beat a hasty retreat, her overlong skirts hissing along behind her. The man she had stepped in to help scrambled to his feet and fled after her, and the din died down almost as quickly as it started. The muttering between individuals did not cut out, however, and continued for the next few hours I remained there. I didn't listen in. I wondered, instead, what kind of life that woman must have led, for undeath to count as an acceptable extension of it.

* * *

><p>I didn't earn Cross his job, not to start with. He reappeared on the third day, spluttering in disbelief at the sight of me, sitting still on my table.<p>

'You haven't even moved, have you, mate? You've not even moved.'

'Showing a deficiency in enthusiasm from the start, I see.'

The second voice hissed and slithered. The speaker did not enunciate. The hard flats of his consonants fell through, and each word seemed fit to collapse into a breath laced with tangible malice. This was a voice that would suit the worst of the monsters in the Scholomance, and it raised me instantly from my musing on the woman and the Forsaken as a whole.

My gaze met Sythros. He stood not a few metres away, wearing a featureless black robe that covered him from throat to floor. His head had been broken into pieces and pulled back together with crisscrossing belts, the scalp long gone and the skull polished to bright white, while his cheeks had been torn down to the last few rotting sinews. I saw his dark tongue flick in the bone-and-sinew cradle of his ruined jaw as he considered me. His Forsaken eyes blazed past the limits of their sockets, flickering all the way up his forehead to the line of metal studs that held the flesh in place.

Cross brought him to dig into my mind. I might have pushed him back if he had continued to approach, but instead this putrid wreck of a man stayed where he was, his flaming eyes fixed on me. The shadows in the folds of his robe, between the flagstones at his feet, darkened and streamed up around him as he raised his hand toward me. Deep within my skull, something slithered.

It was cold and slick and it forced its way through my mind as though my memories and my emotions were a physical arena for exploration. It left a sickening trail of slime over everything it touched, and each scene rose up all around me as the corruption crept through it: memories of home; my siblings; my mother.

In that moment my mental snarls and pitfalls, the dislocation and confusion, all fell away. A mental clarity past anything I'd felt in years stole over me. My very being seemed to coalesce within me to push the intruder back.

Fighting off a mental attack is like pushing against air, it's like imagining up an enemy just to start striking back. Good shadow priests will duck and dodge into different forms when they're in your brain, they'll disengage by blending in and disappearing. But it didn't work for Sythros. He'd enraged some part of me that had fight left in it, and I saw his presence as clearly in my mind's eye as I saw his undead body standing right in front of me. Darting between the trees of Lordaeron, I saw him change from tar to smoke, from smoke to snake, from snake to slug, and I tore after him, I slammed him back, I threw him against the wall of my family home and struck him with shockwave after shockwave.

In the physical world, he began to laugh. It was a low, rasping chuckle at the start, but it soon flourished into a maniacal cackle. Somehow I became aware of myself again, of pulsing pain in my skull, and wetness down the back of my neck.

'Mate, are you-' Cross looked back and forth between me and Sythros, coming to focus on the latter. 'Are you hurting him?'

'He's _fighting me_.'

Sythros strode forward and caught me by the front of my robe. I was too caught up in the mental battle to co-ordinate a physical attack: he thrust me not half a step back and my shoulder blades struck the wall; I had backed up toward it unaware, and cracked my head solidly against it as my body contorted with the effort of resistance. Sythros leant close now, so close his putrid breath struck my face.

'Impressive, _Sand Lydon_. Persevere a little longer and perhaps I shall accept your friend's good word.'

Hopeless. I was already fighting with everything I had, and as the words left Sythros's mouth his mental projection surged up, a shadowy tide, and hurled me backward. I crashed through the stone wall of my home, through breakfast with my siblings, through Lordaeron in bloom with my mother striding ahead on the way to the apothecary, through Florence's archery lessons and my father's attempts at teaching me to whittle. From the memories of my family I had been so determined to defend, he sent me hurtling into the main room in the Scholomance, where I applied a corrosive to a man's face and watched his cheeks begin to melt.

Any spirit in me died down at that. The strength I had brought up in defence of my family withered away at the recollection of who I really was; any vision of myself as defender sloughed away like an insect's wasted skin. Underneath I was thin, fragile, weak. I felt Sythros's sneer all the way through my mind as he withdrew.

'Sylvanas does not seek such snivelling specimens to serve her.'

'Come off it, he's not snivelling, he's a necromancer, he's just what your lot bloody asked for.'

'Silence your assumptions, Master Cross, lest I decide to steal your tongue.'

'Look, just give me a couple weeks to bring him up to speed and he'll be worth your while.'

Barely able to stand, my weight borne primarily by the stone wall at my back, I looked up at Sythros in the silence that ensued and saw no trace of mercy or even interest in his shrivelled visage. Finally there came a rustle of cloth. His cold, damp fingers grasped my jaw and turned my head. My jaw clenched instinctually, but I was too disorientated from the blast through memory to push him back. His thumb dipped into my eye socket and pressed against the scabbed-over stump of the optic nerve. Distant pain throbbed through my skull.

'What are you doing?' Cross's pitch sat a few notes higher than usual.

'Despite your insolence, you are correct. We desire necromancers, Cross. Master Lydon's strength, both mental and magical, it would seem, is insignificant, and yet…'

'Yet?'

'He is passable, if only because he lacks competition.'

Sythros withdrew his hand and wiped his thumb on the sleeve of his robe.

'On a temporary basis… I accept your fealty.'

He turned about and blew past Cross before he had a chance to reply. Precious seconds passed in which he blinked at me and Sythros strode further, before the shadowstalker whipped around and raced after him, calling for confirmation.

I slid to the ground, my back to the wall, and braced my head on my hand. Nevermind the unknown cause Cross had drawn me into, nevermind the pain in the back of my skull, nevermind even the undead still toiling on around me. I had touched coherence, clarity, for an instant, and I was going to get it back.


End file.
